This was the NYC skyline 20 years ago today.

[Heartstrings]

[mopinko]

1. ya know, i went there that october.

i bought some socks in the empire state gift show w the skyline.
still have them.

[Goonch]

2. ;-{)

[chia]

6. Wow. Thanks for that.

[Sur Zobra]

12. Thanks for posting!

[AngryOldDem]

3. It still hurts to see them in movies, TV show reruns, etc.

They truly defined New York City.

[FakeNoose]

7. I know right? Like the King Kong movie 1976 with Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange

It was made before CGI technology, so the sets and props aren't very believable. However a few of the scenes were done on location.

[AngryOldDem]

9. They were also prominent in "Working Girl".

Especially poignant.

And the Carly Simon song from that movie, “Let the River Run”, was used in a powerful U.S. Postal Service commercial after the anthrax attacks. Still gives me chills.

[Earth-shine]

24. "a few of the scenes were done on location"

That's for sure.

My Dad worked in Tower 2 at the time. He said he looked down from his office on the 52nd floor and saw a giant gorilla lying on the ground.

Fortunately, he was moved to another office before 9-11.

[Heartstrings]

26. The Sopranos had the Twin Towers during the opening credits in the early years.

[Polybius]

37. Absolutely agree

One World Trade Center doesn't hold a candle to them.

[hlthe2b]

4. Haunting...

[Diamond_Dog]

5. When my youngest son was small

He liked snow globes, and when we took the kids to NYC in December for a vacation, I bought him a globe with the NYC skyline side ... it has the Twin Towers inside. He still has it. This would have been in the late ‘90s.

[dalton99a]

8. Kick

[Roc2020]

10. So many memories

I really thought WW111 started that day. Maybe it did.

[Boomerproud]

23. I'm not sure you're wrong.

[marieo1]

11. Thank you

Thank you for posting this beautiful picture. Blessings to our country, the people that live here and special blessings to all who lost loved ones that sad day.

[DemUnleashed]

13. Beautiful shot!

I too get a twinge and pull of my heartstrings whenever I see the Twin Towers on a TV show or movie. One example...I see them a lot when I watch Friends reruns

Still so hard to believe The Twin Towers are gone!!

[IbogaProject]

14. I miss their bar

I miss their bar, The Greatest Bar on Earth, the name not my opinion. Nice music events, great views.

[Javaman]

15. back in the early '80's, my partner and I used to juggle in front of the towers at lunchtime.

I still can't watch the footage.

it still breaks my heart.

[lambchopp59]

16. I've always wanted to go to NYork

Stand on the corner and sell quarts of soft water for a quarter.

[DownriverDem]

17. So sad

I won't forget, but I just can't spend the weekend watching it over and over again. A woman whose son died that day said she appreciates the ceremonies, but it's like a scab being ripped off every year. There is no healing.

[IronLionZion]

18. If Gore was president then

we can imagine how different the world would be today without expensive wars killing people without much benefit.

[SharonAnn]

20. He might have, like Clinton did, stopped the attempted attack.

People seem to forget that Clinton stopped the 2000 Millennium attack planned for Los Angeles by ordering warnings to airlines and all ports of entry. These warnings were based on "chatter" on the communication channels monitored by law enforcement. Terrorists attempting to enter the U.S. from Canada were stopped at their Port of Entry in Port Angeles (?), WA just before New Year's Eve.

[Skittles]

31. and if the attack had happened

he would have done what Obama eventually did - he would have targeted Osama, he wouldn't have started TWO bullshit wars

[AZLD4Candidate]

19. As a native born New Yorker, this photo is painful to look at

[Roland99]

21. I still kinda wish they were rebuilt to look similar

but with obvious structural improvements

[ProfessorGAC]

22. I Used To Visit A Chemical Plant...

...in Jersey City. (Since demolished & remediated) To get there, I took Exchange Street, right along the Colgate-Palmolive building.
With 4 or 5 story buildings on each side of street, all one could see was the WTC, dead ahead.
I went back about a year after the attack.
It was strange driving down that road and seeing empty sky.

[JHB]

27. Dang, if I'd known you were in the neighborhood I'd've bought you a drink

Been in JC since '95. A diner in the subway & PATH levels of the WTC was my usual Sunday Breakfast place when I was exploring lower Manhattan.

I still remember tour buses going under a walkway bridge between the main plaza and WTC7 because its underside was a mirrored cylinder so the people in the double-decker could look up and see themselves.

And one of my uncles worked at the Colgate plant back when that chemical plant was still in operation.


P.S. "Exchange Place", not Exchange Street.

[ProfessorGAC]

29. Thanks For The Correction

At least I remembered Exchange.
That Palmolive plant, for quite some time, is a records storage & company museum. Around 10 years ago, they carved out a secondary server farm there too.
That plant I visited was sold for the real estate. The company was shabbily run and the land was more valuable than the whole company. They sold their product line & trademarks and shuttered the company. I was peripherally involved in the remediation of the site. Joint was dirty!!!!

[JHB]

30. Yeah, that whole area has been redeveloped into office buildings and luxury high-rises.

[Earth-shine]

25. Just for balance, when the towers were built, some people said ...

"They ruined the skyline" due to their dominance.

In the late 70s, my Dad worked on the 52nd floor of Tower 2. The upper floors had not yet been filled in.

I was in high school at the time.

Friends and I would visit Dad, and then sneak up to the top floors to party. We had whole floors of the trade center to ourselves. No security.

Fortunately, he moved to a different office well before 9-11.

[JHB]

28. They took a while to grow on people

They were big boxes that seemed to have little or no "character." And, also, early on Battery Park City was nothing but a flat area being filled in to support later construction, so they were kind of "naked", not simply rising above their surroundings.

I think motion was the key to changing opinions. With two towers, there were distinct perspectives from every direction, and how that perspective shifted as you moved around them.



From the bicentennial "Operation Sail", July 4, 1976.

[electric_blue68]

35. Interesting take...

And Op Sail was so much fun. I watched w family under the GWB by the Little Red Lighthouse the tall ships sail up and head back down. 💖

[electric_blue68]

32. Born & Bred NYC'r ...

JHB
28. They took a while to grow on people
They were big boxes that seemed to have little or no "character."

.

The joke I heard was "They (the towers) were the
boxes that the real buuldings came in".

Being in college in The East Village (more or less) we could sometimes get a glimpse of them being built back then. Little did I know that I'd work there from 9/80 - 8/81 on the 73rd Flr NE corner office of the South Tower 2. That NYS agency moved out of there some years later.

I slowly fell in love with them because they were like blank canvases for the colors of the day to be reflected on their white, and glass window surfaces.

The views were incredible! At times on a clear day with a few puffy clouds as you looked northwards (you could see past the Tappan Zee Bridge) looking over the lower, flatter section of Manhattan before Midtown those clouds shadows would appear over that area. It was like being on a small mountain.

One time as we'd heard about it - I brought my binoculars in so I could watch the Concord Jet take off
from the east windows!

My extended family and I once had lunch buffet at The Windows on the World.
I was at the bar a few times over the decades.
I spent a fair amount of work time in the whole Lower Manhattan area, so I was often catching them in my view from various distances, and angles.

On a city bus not more than week before 9-11 I traveled down to a part of the park above the World Financial Center (Brookfield Plc). We passed under the bridge between the main complex and WT7. Also passed The Stairway right before that bridge where people escaped down.

It took a bunch of years before I stopped imagining that on some fine Spring day before they started the rebuilding that that part of the sky wouldn't suddenly roll back, and like a miracle our towers would once again be standing there, and gleaming in the glorious sunshine of the day.

[crickets]

33. Thank you, Heartstrings and everyone who has contributed

memories and photos to this thread.

[MustLoveBeagles]

34. ...

[Polybius]

36. The Towers were much more beautiful than what replaced them

I can't explain it, but they had a certain kind of magic to them. Makes me tear whenever I see them.

[Violet_Crumble]

38. The attack that launched a thousand conspiracy theories...

I stopped reading the 9/11 forum at DU because it made me so angry, and when I went to look at it recently it's no longer around. Good.

They never had the art deco beauty of the Empire or the Singer buildings, but there was something about them that was beautiful. Maybe it's the hindsight thing of knowing what happened to them, but they were imposing looking and the two of them sort of complimented each other. Plus not many other buildings would have withstood what they did for long enough to allow a lot of people to escape before they collapsed.

[denbot]

39. My roommate woke me up, I could not believe what I was seeing..

I was working in a relatively high-rise office building next to the LAX Hilton, literally just off the runway. A truly surreal day for those of us out side of the impacted areas.

[Heartstrings]

40. I was living in LA (NOHO-Toluca Lake area) when the attacks happened

We lived near the flight pattern for Burbank Airport. All flights were cancelled for days, and all we heard were police helicopters hovering over the nearby studios. It was surreal and eerie how quiet it was….

[LanternWaste]

41. Without a thought, my SO and I watched the musical Godspell last night.

I consciously forgot that one of the sequences, "Yes, It's All For The Best" was shot atop one of the towers as it was finishing final competition.

She thought I'd pulled that movie out for that reason. Maybe it was, I dunno...

[lame54]

42. And a dude walked that with a tightrope

[Demovictory9]

43. I can date movies as pre or post 9-11 by the twin towers